


Message in a Bottle

by sophinisba



Category: Lost
Genre: Character Study, Drugs, Gen, Music, Non-Graphic Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-05-03
Updated: 2007-05-03
Packaged: 2017-10-05 22:27:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/46675
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sophinisba/pseuds/sophinisba
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Charlie tries to get back into songwriting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Message in a Bottle

**Author's Note:**

> Vague spoilers through 3x08 ("Flashes Before Your Eyes"), but mostly safe if you've seen season 2. Takes place sometime before 3x16 ("Catch-22").

Charlie spends a lot more time watching Claire than she realises. It bothered him at first that no one here paid much attention to him, that they didn't know, didn't care who he was. On the other hand, that made it easier to sneak off, didn't it, and get what he needed.

Locke used to follow him, it's true, but Locke's lost interest in little old Charlie, Charlie who isn't trying to make things explode, Charlie who's just trying to take care of Claire. And Charlie's got better at paying attention to whether he's been followed.

Charlie's never quite been happy in all his time on the island, but perhaps the time he was the least sad was the day he gathered those messages from the rest of the survivors and put them in the bottle for Sawyer and Jin and Michael and Walt to carry back with them on their voyage to the real world.

Claire thought she was alone the morning she found the bottle washed back to their own beach. Whole, with the messages still safe inside, dry and untouched and useless, like everything else Charlie had done or made in the time he'd been here. And it didn't even occur to her to think that he might be watching, or that he might care.

He'd felt crushed, then, broken in pieces, and hadn't had a living soul to tell, what with Claire and Locke so distrustful and everyone else ignoring him. So he'd spent some time praying, telling his fears and his loneliness to his dear departed mum and to the Virgin Mary (he'd just found her again). That had to be done in secret, of course, because other people here wouldn't understand. They'd think it suspicious behavior, if they cared to notice him at all. And at first he thought his mother and the Virgin didn't care about him either, as they weren't answering. But soon enough he realized they must be guiding his path.

Charlie was trying his best, and the Virgin sent Mr. Eko to help him find his way. But don't think it was easy, resisting, or trying to explain it all to Claire, or watching the smugglers' plane and everything inside it go up in flames, when he _knew_ what was inside those statues, and how easily it could make him forget how lost he was. But Charlie was trying to be a good Christian, and to help out Claire and the baby and all the others, even if they didn't care for his help.

The night he listened to his mum's voice and the Virgin's and did his best to baptize the baby, the night Locke sent him crashing into the waves while the rest of them just stared, as cold as the water where he might as well have drowned, but didn't... That night he went back to his hiding place in the jungle.

If everyone was going to assume he was still using, if everyone was going to shun him like the junkie he still was inside, if he was going to be made miserable no matter how hard he tried... well, what was the use in trying? He'd break open a virgin and have his fun. Only, wouldn't you know, he wasn't careful enough that time, and Locke managed to follow him there, and knock him down once more – with words, this time, instead of fists.

And Charlie hadn't anyone to go to then. Not even mother or Mary, not even God. He'd never felt more alone in his short, fucked up life.

It had felt good breaking the statue, before Locke took the rest of them away. Charlie spent some time beating his fists against the ground, but it wasn't hard enough, didn't satisfy. Then he hit his head against a tree trunk until he passed out.  
The next day he went to another hiding place, the one where he'd watched Sun bury the messages in the bottle, and he broke that as well. And picked through the shards of glass to pick up the scraps of paper, but he didn't read the messages, not yet. He didn't want to feel any sympathy for these people, not just then, but he kept the scraps of paper for himself.  
The day after that he followed her again, and he broke a heavy stick over her head. Nothing personal, that, wasn't even his idea, but he didn't mind doing it.

He thought about Eko with his big heavy stick. Eko who threatened and beat Sawyer and Michael and Jin. Eko who'd probably killed before, Charlie wouldn't be surprised. And yet no one seemed to mind welcoming him to their camp. And Claire didn't mind trusting _him_ with the baby.  
And Eko could have had anyone's help, once he decided to build a church, and yet for some reason he asked Charlie. Charlie, whom no one but Sawyer had spoken to for a week if it wasn't an insult or an order. But Mr. Eko said, "I need your help, Charlie."

It made a difference, that. Not that it made him feel all right exactly, but it was better, having something to do. And when Mr. Eko said they should prey Charlie could just kneel beside him and fold his hands and listen, and believe. He didn't have to come up with the words for himself.  
Since Eko's been gone Charlie's spent a lot less time praying and more trying time singing. It helps that Claire's decided to trust him again (because he was in a bad place before, but he's trying harder, and he's getting better, and no one needs to know what he did to Sun. No one can ever know) and she lets him sit with the baby more and more. Aaron lies in his little crib and Charlie sings his own songs and better songs, and his voice and his guitar are so feeble by now that everything he tries to sing comes out as a lullaby.

It helps also that he finally went back and read the messages, and he found he could love, at some level _had_ to love the people who wrote them, who sent their hope and love off to others waiting safe and lonely in solid places like England and Australia and America. Sisters and mothers and husbands and friends. Their words had ended up with him instead and they mustn't know, as long as they were all stuck together here they had to think that the bottle had kept floating off to sea, even if the raft had crashed back to shore.

But once they got away from here it would be all right for them to hear what Charlie had done with their words. And in the meantime he has to work at it, because it isn't easy, after all this time, trying to make words obey his wishes and the melody and the chords. Trying to get Kate's angry apology to her mother to balance out Hurley's sweet sad apology to his in the same rhythm. Trying to get Bernard's love for his son to rhyme with his own love for his brother. In the meantime Aaron gets to listen to the work in progress. He won't be one to judge.

He writes in a notebook Eko brought back from that other hatch they found. It's got the Dharma Initiative logo on the cover. He meant to cover that up, decorate it with some more inspiring words or pictures like he used to do, but there's no glue, and just about all the paper they have just has variations on the same black octagon. So he stares at it, when he feels stuck, and thinks about what little he knows about Hinduism, most of which he learned from George Harrison.

He thinks about the space between them all, and the way then man who'd been his friend went and hid behind a wall of illusion so he could save the world with his love every hundred and eight minutes. He wonders if it makes sense to believe in the reincarnation of a Catholic priest. "Life flows on within you and without you," he sings, and as always the last note sounds incomplete, not like the end, so he goes back and sings it again, wishing he could make his guitar sound more like a sitar or a dilruba.

He'd had a tape of Sgt. Pepper's when he was a boy, but he always used to fast-forward over that one. It was difficult, getting it to stop at the right place, because whenever he checked to see where he was in the song it was more droning that meant nothing to him. He couldn't tell where he was.

When he'd grown up and had loads of money he bought the CD that made it so much easier to skip tracks, he'd found he didn't want to skip that one anymore. In fact he'd skip back to listen again, fascinated. And then he'd put it on repeat and then shoot up, and let his mind float around those shifting, swooping notes for hours.

Whenever Charlie gets tired of trying to write his own songs he sings the Beatles. He figures that if Aaron's to be raised on the island, thousands of miles from civilisation or hope of rescue, even if he's not to understand football or tea (because Dharma Initiative teabags and powdered milk will not help anyone understand real tea) or to read more books than _Watership Down_, he should at least be familiar with the work of the Beatles.

"And in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make," he sings, thinking how it's lovely and at the same time confusing that dharma rhymes with karma, since that makes it harder to keep straight just what they mean, and what he's meant to do with them.

What goes around comes around, or so he's been told, and if the message you tried to send back to the world came right back to you, maybe there's a reason for that too.

Sometimes when he's feeling less hopeful he sings the Police instead: "Sendin' out an SOS." It's not really comforting but it's quiet – in Charlie's version, at least – and it repeats, regular as the waves on the beach. He sings the line over and over until he and the baby fall asleep.  
Charlie isn't quite happy now, and he isn't as hopeful as the day they sent off the raft, but he doesn't despair anymore either. He hopes – no, he _believes_ he'll get to play him the records someday, rather than depend on his own tired voice and damaged guitar. Help will come sooner or later and they'll get back to normal life, only it'll be a lot more normal than what Charlie or Claire had before.

He thinks between the lawsuit against Oceanic and what the publicity will have done for sales of Driveshaft's old albums, they'll be able to buy a nice little house in Sydney or the suburbs. On Sundays they'll go to church with Liam and Karen and little Meghan. (Claire doesn't care about all of that, but once they get back she'll understand how important it is, for the baby.) And on Sunday afternoons they'll have dinner together, all six of them, and maybe there'll be more babies eventually as well. And while the kiddies are out in the yard, on the swings, under the sun, and their mums watching and chatting with each other the way mums do, all quiet like, Charlie and Liam can sit in the living room with the piano and a guitar or two and sing whatever it is that comes into their heads and through their fingers and their instruments.

The song he's been trying to make out of his friends' messages will come together easily once he's put the trauma behind him and has his brother's help. And no one will care by then that he's read their secrets and turned them into a song, because they'll all be home, and the song will be beautiful. They can record an album or two there in Sydney and play a few shows. And when the children are a bit older they can go on a few tours – little ones, just back and forth along the coast – Charlie doesn't really have much idea of what the distances are but he thinks he'll insist they go by bus. With the whole family there in Sydney he'll never have reason to get on a plane again. The shows will be small as well, and quiet, but they'll be able to charge a lot for the tickets what with having been miraculously reunited, divinely willed to make music together again.

Destiny, that's it, or maybe dharma, but he'll figure out the details later, and it'll all work out. Because whether they leave tomorrow or ten years from now or never, Aaron needs someone to teach him to sing the Beatles. And that's how Charlie knows Desmond's wrong.

**Author's Note:**

> Song lyrics quoted:  
> [](http:)Within You Without You,   
> [](http:)The End,   
> [](http:)Message in a Bottle


End file.
